An Elon Musk-Funded PAC Is Running a Democrat Impersonation Campaign

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1:56Hello and welcome to the 404 Media Podcast. I am Jason Kebler. We are Joe-less today, so I will be hosting this. I have with me Emmanuel. Hello. And Sam. Hi. and uh i guess the first housekeeping thing is we have socks available for sale uh on our merch store so if you've been looking for something to cover your feet uh to um you know stay uh warm in the fall and also modest in the fall you can check that out on our merch store you can find that at 404media.co they are modest they cover your ankles they do yeah sam is the model of the for the these and I think there's a couple photos of me as well and then a very threatening drain photo but we posted that on our site last week so you can go check that out this week we are going to be talking about the election and Facebook's role in it and also Elon Musk's role in it.

3:06And then we're going to talk in the second half of the show about how AI is invading hospitals, is being pushed on doctors. So that's what you're in for. I guess we'll start with my story. Elon Musk funded PAC Supercharges Progress 2028 Democrat impersonation ad campaign. this is very like complicated to explain i feel like that in a headline uh i wanted to use the term false flag i think emmanuel and sam both didn't like that term and i think that they were correct because a false flag is usually like conspiracy terminology for a specific irl event i also thought about calling it a honeypot or a psyop which maybe psyop is correct i would say It's a psyop for sure.

3:59Yeah, it's a psyop. So I guess I will explain what's going on here. So at the end of September, a website popped up called progress2028.com. And if you go to progress2028.com, it says two Americans ready for progress regarding how we build a sustainable engine of progressive change to carry us to 2028. and then you sort of scroll through and it is like it's not that long but it's basically like Kamala Harris's plan for her presidency which includes like quote empowering undocumented immigrants building our future mandatory gun buybacks sort of like open border vibes trans healthcare for all, including children, no parents allowed, and things like this.

5:03And I think if you're just like scrolling this page quickly, it sounds like sort of run-of-the-mill progressive ideas. But if you read it closer, it is sort of like an ultra-progressive like strategy that I would say is like a caricature of what conservatives are scared of, more or less. It's like a lot of it aligns very closely with the attack ads that have been running against Kamala Harris all over the country and especially in swing states. And I think that a lot of these policies are probably what, you know, very progressive of people would like to see. Like, I think mandatory gun buyback, very good idea.

5:56I would like to see that. But that is like, as many people know, Kamala Harris has like really moderated her opinions and sort of like run to the center in this election to try to get a lot of Republican votes. She's like campaigning with Liz Cheney, so on and so forth. It's like, she does not want mandatory gun buyback. She's like on every podcast saying that she has a Glock, more or less. And she's used it. She loves to say, yeah, she's like, and I use it. Yeah, well, so there you go. Yeah. She's also like tried to say that she's going to be tough on the border. And she has like, you know, basically moderated every opinion.

6:37And these opinions that are being promoted on Progress 2028 are not positions that she's really like ever held as far as I know. Most of them are, you know, I'm going to fully ban fracking and ban internal combustion engines for cars is like not a position that she has ever seriously held as far as I know. So in any case, like this, this website pops up at the end of September. It's called Progress 2028. It is clearly like an attempt to create the democratic version of Project 2025, which Democrats have been very successful in running on, which is, you know, this like thousand page document, very serious, serious in terms of like, a lot of thought has gone into it.

7:31put together by the Heritage Foundation, which is a conservative think tank, and have been able to pin this on Trump. And essentially what this seems to be is like a document was created that conservatives can point to and say, look, this is Kamala Harris's secret plan for 2028. And this pops up at the end of September. I got a tip on Signal from someone who told me about the article I wrote two weeks ago about this Elon Musk super PAC targeting Muslims in Michigan with messaging saying that Kamala Harris is pro-Israel. And then in Pennsylvania, Jewish people were getting ads saying that she is like pro-Palestine.

8:24So they're completely, you know, diametrically opposed messages that are being micro-targeted. And he said, hey, look, like, Progress 2028 exists, and it's the same PAC that's doing this. So it's the same Elon Musk-funded super PAC that is putting this together, and they are essentially targeting conservative voters with this ultra-progressive messaging that is, like, designed to inflame them and get them to be angry about Kamala Harris. Harris's secret plan. Does that make any sense? I feel like that took a very long time to explain, but it's like somewhat diabolical. It makes sense. But I feel like we also like, that's just the setup of like what the story is.

9:09So that's how like, how deep this goes. So yeah. Do you want to talk a little bit about the ads that this pack is running? Because I think that the copy on these ads was wild. If you want to get into what they are and maybe read some of them yeah so they um they set up this website and then they started like texting people um and that's like that's sort of when i learned about it then the website open secrets which it uh studies finance in political campaigns did a story tying progress 2028 to um the Elon Musk funded super PAC, which is called Building America's Future. And they were very tricky about how they did this.

9:55Like they registered to run Progress 2028 as a fictitious name under the PAC, which is insane that that is like a thing that you can do. You can basically like set up this dark money thing where someone funds one organization and then that organization funnels money to another organization. And then that organization sets up a subgroup under a fictitious name. And it's very difficult to track who is funding this, how they're doing it, who's behind it. So I know that's more setup, but basically in the last few days, they've started running a huge number of Facebook ads. And they're micro-targeting this stuff.

10:37We don't know how they're targeting it because Facebook's ad library really sucks. It doesn't tell you the parameters by which they're being targeted. But we can tell that they're micro-targeting it because they're running like 56 different versions of about a dozen different ads. So it's a total of 900 different ads that are being targeted to like 900 different groups. And here's one. It says, imagine a world where the American dream has no borders. and then it's like a bunch of people lined up at the border. They all look Latino to me in this picture. It's made to invoke the Mexico-U.S. border for sure.

11:23And then it says, Kamala has. See her vision for our future. And then the text of the ad says, we want to build an America where everyone, regardless of where they were born, has the opportunity to thrive. And Kamala Harris shares our vision. Drop a comment to thank Kamala. Another ad says, we're beyond thrilled to have Kamala on our side for the ban on fracking. Did you know she wasn't just a supporter of the Green New Deal? She was the very first 2020 presidential candidate to enthusiastically champion it. And then the picture there says, imagine a world without gas powered vehicles. Kamala has.

12:03There's a few ads about trans healthcare for children. There's a few ads about mandatory gun buybacks. And all of these have started running on Facebook in the last four days. I think the one with the gun dissolving is my favorite. It's like when Thanos snaps his fingers fading. It's also, I mean, all of these are so on the nose and the one with the gun is that way in that it is a pistol, right? It's not an AR-15. It's not, it's like the most extreme version of gun control. Perhaps it is a Glock. I don't know. I can identify the pistol. It's like the thing that you would like concealed carry. Like you can see like someone like getting like really pissed off.

12:54Like a conservative being like, you will not dissolve my gun. Everything is almost, I think as Jason says in the article, parody of democratic positions. Yeah. And I mean, the interesting thing also is that I have noticed that the Facebook ads are a little bit less extreme than the text messages. Like the text messages say, they use the same imagery, but a Republican registered voter in Pennsylvania sent me a bunch of texts that he got over the last few days from this group. And it uses the same dissolving gun, like one of them uses the same dissolving gun picture, but then it says, like, it basically says Kamala Harris supports a nationwide gun buyback program.

13:46And it says, like, mandatory gun buybacks in a few of the texts that I've seen. And it's having the intended effect. And we know that because there was a post on the gun politics subreddit that was like, vote like your rights depend on it. And it was a picture of a screenshot of that text message where it was talking about mandatory gun buybacks. And the person who got this text responded to that text message and said, quote, I have a nice warm bowl of cat shit you commies can share over the Canadian border where you belong. Fuck you from me in America. And then like all the comments are like, oh my God, I can't believe Kamala Harris is going to do that.

14:33And then over time, people realized that this was like an Elon Musk led psyop. But like the intended reaction is that conservatives are going to get messages like this and then they are going to be very mad and they're going to like share it with their friends and say like, look what Kamala Harris is going to do. Um, and I think the fact that the text messages are like a little bit more extreme is very concerning because we have almost no insight into text message campaigning. It's like there's been a lot of articles about text message spam during this cycle, but with online ads and with TV ads and with mailers, there's like a federal database in some cases of election mail.

15:22And then in other cases, like with Snapchat, there's a political ad library where you can see the targeting information, you can see what the ad was. I think that Meta's ad library is like really lacking for the reasons that I mentioned, but it does show what the ads actually are and you can see them. And I think that that's really important. whereas with a text message ad it's like you cannot see what people are getting unless people are sharing them online there's no national database kept by AT &T or Verizon that shares like here's here's what people are seeing and here's how they're being sent and it's really interesting because one of the phone numbers being used to send these messages to conservatives previously used run-of-the-mill Republican messaging from this same group.

16:20And we know it's the same group because they were running the same ads on Facebook about menthol cigarettes and how Kamala Harris is going to ban menthol cigarettes, which we can then see on Snapchat and Facebook. And then like a week later, they're pretending to be Kamala Harris, which is pretty sloppy, but it is a pretty good indication that this is... these are like Republican funded PACs sending this. This is not like Kamala Harris doing this or a Democratic PAC sending this. And if you want to read more about that, you can check out like Alex Howard, who runs a site called Civic Text, did a really good article about why there should be a national database of text messages for political advertising.

17:05I think that's like really important. If we still have a democracy in four years, check that out. but yeah, I don't know. Is there anything else on this before, before we move on? Like, what do you think? Uh, I forget how long ago it was, but maybe it was last year. We wrote something to the effect of, um, we're in the fuck it area of social media moderation. And I think one of the examples we gave is that following 2016 and people being in a real panic about how Facebook had this, I think we can probably say now, like overstated role in getting Trump elected then. People are really mad about Facebook and enabling all these ads from Russia and like fake users from Russia and events created on Facebook to fool people to go to fake protests and stuff like this.

18:05And after all that outrage, Facebook paraded all these election war rooms for various elections around the world saying they're doing all this stuff about misinformation. I don't think we're seeing a ton of that for this election cycle. And I'm wondering, I don't know, what is our general assessment of how Facebook is handling... I don't know, election-related misinformation, even if it's coming from like super PACs and coming from people who are stated funders and supporters of one of the candidates. Yeah, I mean, we haven't really talked about this on the podcast and I don't even think we've talked about it amongst ourselves much.

18:53I think, so Facebook and Meta more broadly has said it doesn't want to have anything to do with politics. and so it has said outright that it's like we are going to not recommend political stuff to people unless you're following it and you can like opt out of it more or less i don't even know the specifics on it at this point because adam masseri uh who is in charge of instagram has said so many different things on this but it's like there was a washington post article where posts with the word vote in them systematically were shown to fewer people than, you know, non-political posts on Instagram.

19:39And I think that you can extrapolate that that probably extends to Facebook. There's also been a lot of journalists on threads who are saying like, I was banned for posting the word Hitler, even though I was just doing like, you know, reporting and talking about Donald Trump. And so I think that that's very bad. I think that they're handling this extremely poorly. I think that then at the same time, there are millions and millions and millions and millions of dollars being spent on political ads on meta platforms. And presumably this is not like, they're not silencing the ads, You can still pay for reach on Facebook.

20:21And so Facebook and meta platforms more broadly are like places where you can advertise to your heart's content. But if you try to share news or politics, like there's a very good chance that it's either going to not be shared as widely or that it's going to be like actively suppressed.

20:43and yet I feel like those platforms are less important than ever is sort of my personal feeling and then like what Elon Musk is doing right now is so mind-boggling it is so hard to even like know where to begin with like what Elon Musk is doing right now in terms of actively campaigning with Donald Trump, turning X into, you know, like a far right platform, like actively sharing disinformation to millions and millions and millions of people about all sorts of things, offering to pay people in Pennsylvania for voting, like with this weird sweepstakes that may or may not be legal, you know, all the PAC stuff.

21:29And then at the same time, being like a really one of like having his companies propped up by government contracts and talking to Vladimir Putin in this free time. Like, I don't even think this is like all of the things. And so it's hard to say how much of an impact X will have. It's like Twitter has always been smaller than those other platforms. And yet it has become like this active disinformation space that I feel like the Facebook question is almost beside, not beside the point, but it's like, how do you disentangle that? It's like the information ecosystem is so fucked up right now. It's way worse than it was in 2016.

22:15And it wasn't even clear the impact that, you know, fake news had in the 2016 election. I just, I don't even know how to like begin to parse it more or less. Yeah, it seems, I'm not, I'm also skeptical of how much impact it has, but it is incredibly depressing. And it is messed up in the same way that all our non-consensual nudity reporting shows that Facebook is messed up. There's just so many ads, and Facebook is clearly not doing a good job of looking at them. I think if you keep pushing Facebook on this, these ads are not going to fly for impersonation reasons. I am somewhat confident they will eventually take action on this, by which point it will be too late.

23:09But that's just the Facebook portion of it. Everything else you said is just like, and I hate to be this guy because it's such a tired point by now. but it's just like i can't believe this is just allowed during like this very long election cycle just like yeah pay people to vote and like just buy fake ads pretending to be the other candidates and and so on it's just not the case in countries where there's like a legally mandated like two weeks of or two months of campaigning or something like this just just bummer vibes bummer vibes all around as always is around the election yeah i think the last thing i'll say is like there's so much money being poured into politics now.

23:52And it's like, obviously, obviously, like if you live in Pennsylvania or Wisconsin or Michigan, you're just getting absolutely hammered with this stuff. And it's crazy how much money is being spent trying to target like increasingly small numbers of voters. But I think to your point, it's like this election season goes on for so long and there's so much money that it's like campaigns and PACs can just throw shit at the wall and try everything. And this to me, like, I have no idea whether this progress 2028 thing is going to be successful in any way, shape or form. But it's like, it seems like some idea that was just like, someone had one day like in a terrible meeting and they're like, yeah, fuck it, let's try it.

24:41It does not seem like a carefully considered political strategy to me, but what do I know? Okay, we will leave that there for the first half of the show. When we come back, we will talk about AI in hospitals.

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29:19Okay, and we're back. We're talking about a big scoop from Sam. leaked training shows how doctors in New York's biggest hospital system are using AI. Sam, the story is about a hospital system called Northwell Health. Who are they? Yeah, Northwell is one of... Actually, it is the biggest hospital network, healthcare network in New York. It has over 85 ,000 employees. If you live in New York, you probably have touched Northwell's network in some capacity. Yeah, so just to kind of give you the background of this story, a couple months ago, I got a leaked recording of this hour-long demonstration slash presentation from internal Northwell Health leadership.

30:16And this presentation was just like a training, kind of, or like a demo of this new tool that's like fancy new AI tool that they had called AI Hub. And they were encouraging staff to use it. They're kind of like trying to get people onboarded to use it. They were like, you know, we have a couple thousand people using it now and it's spreading word of mouth. They were like very excited about getting this thing popular within the network, I guess. And then I think that, I mean, I don't want to laugh at this person's title, but the title of the person giving the presentation was Senior Vice President and Chief of Digital Innovation and Transformation.